Directly is offering unprecedented customer service efficiency with its latest feature: Certified Experts. This new feature allows companies to send a high volume of on-demand customer inquiries to their best and brightest product experts who will be armed with the tools and information they need to solve even the most complex of cases.
“This is about finding and certifying the top performers in a company’s network,” explains Directly CEO Antony Brydon. “By connecting these experts with the education, information, and tools, it lets them solve a much greater number of cases, and solve them better. It’s about increasing the impact of the number of cases they can solve and making them more effective, which will increase customer satisfaction.”
Top Experts Get More Info
As Directly Head of Product Jeff Patterson explains, Certified Experts crunches large amounts of data to identify the top performers within a company’s network based on factors like support volume and response time. A company can then invite those experts onto the platform to become certified. The Certified Experts feature offers companies the ability to create sets of certification tests and educational material, upload legal documents for experts to agree on, and use custom apps that allow experts to access information and simple tools. This gives experts the ability to handle complex inquiries that may require personal and account based info.
“With Certified Experts you can actually start getting the important information into the hands of the most trusted members of your network,” Patterson says.
In order to gather data on the strongest performers, Brydon recommends implementing the Certified Experts feature after a company’s Directly network has grown for a few months. Patterson says the feature can be integrated into most any customer service software. Once a company has identified a subset of experts, they need to consider the types of cases that they want them to handle and the education, information, and tools they may need to handle it.
Brydon says it is helpful for companies to “bucket” the inquiries, or categorize the types of questions to see which would require a certified expert.
“For each bucket there is a certain volume and a certain expense a company has to pay,” Brydon explains. “But now companies can look at those buckets and say, ‘Would this bucket of questions be right for a general expert, and are there other buckets that would be good for certified experts if we gave them increased education,information, and tools?’”
Top Experts Solve More Problems
Where do these experts come from? Typically, they are from the network of people who interact with a company’s product often, including expert users, customers, partners, even internal employees who don’t typically answer customer questions.
Patterson says Directly will continue to build more functionality into Certified Experts and says the feature will make the company’s offering more impactful. For instance, a certified expert could potentially view order detail to help resolve an inquiry about a shipment.
“We are anticipating that this will allow us to grow significantly to our existing customers and also actually be able to launch a whole new set of customers,” Patterson says.
Brydon says Certified Experts is part of Directly’s mission to improve how companies provide dynamic customer support.
“What we aim to do with this product is increase the cases that a company’s experts can solve, so that more and more of their problems are being solved by their passionate and knowledgeable users, and customers can receive the highest quality care.”
Are you interested in a demo? Email my colleague Peter Thalman at pthalman@directly.com to schedule one.